


War Poetry

by 2ndA



Series: GK/WWII AU [3]
Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, M/M, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-06
Updated: 2015-08-06
Packaged: 2018-04-13 08:32:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4515075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2ndA/pseuds/2ndA
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the conclusion to the WWII AU started for a gk kink meme prompt, and available on A03 as "Owed By So Many to So Few" (http://archiveofourown.org/works/1623296) and "The Shortest Way Home" (http://archiveofourown.org/works/1873980). You should probably read at least the first story for this to make sense, but there is a summary/spoilers in the end notes.  These characters are not mine, merely adapted from the miniseries and mixed in with some poorly-fact-checked and un-Brit-picked fiction.</p><p>The epigraph is adapted from Karl Marlantes's novel Matterhorn (Vietnam war) and the end-quote is the original cut-tag, from the movie Lawrence of Arabia (desert warfare in WWI).</p><p>I love comments!</p>
            </blockquote>





	War Poetry

 

 

_It was extremely important, psychologically, to know exactly how many days a man had left until his tour of duty was over…  
However, there was an ambiguity.  Do you call the day you board the plane for home your last day in or your first day out…?  
This was resolved by calling it a “wake-up”…It is the day you wake up at war, but the day you go to sleep somewhere else._

 

  
Brad does not return to Mathilda Farm in the autumn, although he does return to Britain.  Sixty-one days after Imperial Japan surrenders to the Allies, eighty-six days after the United States melts Nagasaki, eighty-nine days after the bombing of Hiroshima, his troop transport docks near London. By virtue of his service record in the Army Air Force and his office work in Ally-occupied Berlin, Brad wrangles an assignment with the British Royal Marines.  His application is helped by the fact that everyone else wants to get _out_ of the military as soon as humanly possible.

To go with his new position, the USAAF gives Brad a promotion and Royal Marines find him a room.  Brad knows which one is more valuable: sixty percent of all the homes in London had been damaged by bombing during the Blitz—something like 2,000,000 people are homeless.  He’s billeted with a Mrs. Murphy, and it seems the Murphys have come up in the world since that incident with the overalls and the chowder because the address is a beautifully appointed townhouse in an exclusive section of London.  Somehow, Mrs. Murphy had managed to get through the entire war without having to take in a single refugee. Given the choice between Brad and a family of eight bombed out of the East End, she had accepted him as the lesser of evils.  Of course, as she explained to Brad _every evening_ over his tea, she shouldn’t have to take _anyone_ in until the bombing damage was repaired.  Brad made the mistake of showing polite interest one night and was taken on a full tour of the bedroom suite with the cracked plaster.  Mrs. Murphy was apparently waiting on the Minster of Works himself to show up one day and hang new paper. Brad suspected it would be a long, dull wait.

Perversely, Brad likes Mrs. Murphy.  She maintains a policy of polite detachment; never inquires about his family, friends, or wartime service; and feeds him as though rationing were an insult to the dignity of her household.  She doesn’t try to mother him, which saves them both needless embarrassment.  Besides, he thinks she must be a tough cookie to have gotten through this war on her own, with no more damage than a crack in the spare bedroom.

Finally, sick to death of hearing about that goddamn wall, Brad cadges materials and mends the fucking plaster.  (He’s a little surprised to find how quickly his hands learn their way around the borrowed tools.  After all, he’s barely so much as held a hammer since leaving the CCC three days after Pearl Harbor was bombed. But, of course, as a boy on his father’s building sites, he’d occasionally been given the job of standing guard over some new construction to make sure the plaster stayed damp and dried evenly.  Some things really do stay with you).  Before he knows it, he is on call with a string of Mrs. Murphy’s friends and acquaintances for minor home repairs.  He patches cracked windows, fixes blocked sinks, mends the sort of domestic ills that pop up over five years of making do with substandard materials and no men.  In return, he gets innumerable cups of tea, knitted socks, and wedges of the kind of sponge cake a lady can make without exceeding her sugar ration.

Brad makes the mistake of mentioning these home repairs to Ray in a letters, and Ray follows with a highly detailed, poorly spelled fantasy about how Brad is sure to meet some duchess, and become the Fifth Earl of Castlereigh-Marmaduke, and get presented at court, and, and….   For the hundredth time, Brad vows to burn all future correspondence and stop this crazy pen-pal relationship that has grown up between them since Ray returned to the States.

Much to Brad's astonishment, it seems that Ray is actually a very talented mechanic.  The ink had barely been dry on Germany's unconditional surrender when he was immediately transferred out of the ranks and into some specialized top-secret program on the Texas/New Mexico border.  Now, Ray sends colorful commentary about the “wine-sipping Communist dick sucks” in and around Fort Bliss.  Brad is unclear on why the US military would station an experienced aircraft weapons mechanic somewhere in the remote Southwest, especially _after_ the cessation of hostilities.  It seems like general-issue Army fuckery until he remembers reading that a bunch of scientists basically built secret nuclear bombs in the high desert of New Mexico. That, along with the fact that Ray writes about everything except work, makes Brad suspect he must be doing something really important.

In the end, Brad composes a perfectly reasonable response to Ray’s profane ranting and sends it par avion  ( _Dear Corporal, be advised: if you ever again ally my name with any branch of the British peerage without my express written authorization, all the king's horses and all the king's men will be unable to reassemble your putrid carcass…)_. Writing to Ray is really a public service, Brad tells himself.  After all, if Ray weren’t sending him wads of scribbled pages every month, who else would that whiskey tango hick have to write to?  Brad figures the Red Cross refugee commission has enough to deal with, never mind getting repeated letters asking about the wherebouts of a certain Polish partisan.

++++

Thanksgiving falls early, on November 22, and Brad is invited to three different dinners (American Legion London office, USO, and something sponsored by a group of officers’ wives) despite the fact that it is not a British holiday. He begs off—prior engagement—and feels no obligation to explain that the engagement involves replacing leaky washers for one of Mrs. Murphy’s many friends.  The woman is late, rushing down from the streetcar stop in a flurry of apologies and rainwater to let him in to her terraced flat.  She is younger than most of Mrs. Murphy’s circle, early thirties. When she pauses in the cramped front hall to unpin her hat and smooth down her hair, Brad is suddenly distracted by her hands.  They are a little large for a woman, with long clever fingers and wrists so thin that every gesture seems peculiarly graceful.  Ruth, or Rose, Mrs…Gordon?  Brad isn’t really listening to the introductions and then it’s too late to ask.  
Ruth (or Rose) hangs his overcoat—her quick fingers automatically smoothing the collar—and then leads him to the offending sink.  There are a few tools kept in a home-sewn roll of Liberty print; she picks apart the ties.  Brad immediately turns his back on her, feeling oddly shaken.   He doesn’t know this woman, hasn’t even looked at her long enough to know her eye color, but he has the sudden and inexplicable desire to put her fingertips in his mouth.  She says something about the weather and Brad mumbles a reply.  He focuses on the work in front of him: the dripping faucet and corroded works beneath it.  He fumbles in his pocket and she drops to her hands and knees to pick up the replacement washers that scatter across the worn linoleum.

“Lawrence always meant to replace these,” Ruth says.  She holds out the washers cupped in her palm.

“Uh-huh,” Brad replies, nodding toward the worktop so she’ll lay them down, so he doesn’t have to pick them up from her hand.  For a tense moment, he doesn’t think the washer will fit: he’ll have to come back to finish the job.  But then it suddenly slips into place; Brad lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding.

When the work is finished, she offers him (of course) a cup of tea.  “It’s so lovely of you to come out here, and at the end of the day…and the weather…”

She turns to fill the kettle at the newly-repaired sink.  Brad’s eyes follow her hand on the faucet, her arm, the nape of her neck where her hair is just slipping out of its pins.  There’s a moment of silence, just running water, while she waits for him to pick up the conversation.  When he doesn’t, she begins again,  “You know, Lawrence always said he was going to repair that faucet, just as soon as he got the chance—”

She trails off, realizing that she has already said all of this, but unable to think of anything new to say to a man who is, after all, a complete stranger, a friend's acquaintance. And he has nothing to say to her, a young war widow with beautiful hands.

“I should get going,” Brad says, awkwardly, a beat too late.  “The weather…”  She doesn’t press him to stay for tea.

+++

He stops when he has turned the corner and lets his umbrella tip until he can feel the night’s faint drizzle on his flushed face.  _Where_ had _that_ come from?  _Where in the world…?_

Secretly, irrationally, Brad blames Nate.  Before, Brad worried about people when he had to, when they impacted his life.  And when they didn’t, he didn’t.  It had served him well all through the war, what with being trained and re-trained and constantly rotated from one flight crew to another as gaps opened up in the roster.  (Brad hadn’t even thought much about why those gaps opened.  As the music-hall comedian used to say, “When your car gives up, there you are.  When your plane gives up, there you _ain’t_.” Bombers crashed.  Crewmen died.  Pilots burned.  It was war. _Thinking_ about it wasn’t mission effective.) There hadn’t been much of a point in keeping in touch with people.  Making friends had never been Brad’s strong suit; why expend the effort with everything so temporary, so uncertain?  If he ran into someone he knew at an airfield, great.  And if not, that was fine, too.

Until he’d ended up on Nate’s doorstep just in time for a holiday Brad didn’t even celebrate.  In his memory, _that_ was the point, the exact point, when Brad had started to become curious about other people.  He’d say it was because Nate was a curious person, something about his civilian-self just not right.  But even after Brad had solved that little mystery, he still found himself thinking about Nate, wondering about his sisters, about Walt, even—god help him—about Ray.  This had only been reinforced when Brad found Nate in Germany.  Impractical and unlikely as that was, the reunion was an object lesson in the idea that people could rotate back _into_ your life, not just out of it. Even now, as he splashes through puddles because he’s not up for the crush on the bus, a little part of Brad’s mind is thinking about Mrs. Gordon sitting down to drink tea in her little house, all alone, Lawrence’s plain gold wedding band on her lovely left hand.

It’s a long, cold walk back to Mrs. Murphy’s house and Brad blames Nate for that, too. Why the hell not? Mrs. Murphy has left a covered plate waiting for him when he arrives, along with a sheet of notepaper.  She hopes Mrs. Gordon is well; she thinks Brad should ‘look in’ on Mrs. McEwall’s dodgy gas meter; she left his friend’s card on the telephone table with the post…

Brad takes his plate and fork into the front hall, trying to remember which old biddy is Mrs. McEwall, and sifts through the mail.  At the bottom of the pile, he finds an engraved business card: the privileges of the Bravo Club have been extended to him, as a courtesy to….  Nate has written his name in the space provided.  It’s like an upscale field services postcard, Brad thinks, giddily.   On the back are handwritten words: _eight, drinks, 23 rd Nov_.

Brad studies the card.  The address means nothing to him, but he would recognize the handwriting anywhere.  Nate has a habit of suddenly dropping into his life, but tonight, Brad feels as though he’s summoned him with the power of his thoughts.  Ridiculous, of course, unless you’re a fucking superstitious teenaged girl who believes in soulmates and love at first sight.  Brad is a death-dealing warrior, trained by the armed forces of one of the last great powers: he believes in coincidence and bad timing.  Besides, if Brad’s _thinking_ about Nate could keep him nearby, the Englishman would never get farther than the next room.

The next morning, Brad has Mrs. Murphy decode the etiquette.  “You’re invited to the club bar,” she says, clearly wondering if he was raised by baboons. “Tonight, at eight o’clock. Obviously, it’s an informal invitation.  Even so, a gentleman always leaves a visiting card if his party is out.”

Brad suspects a gentleman left a visiting card if his party was out _in 1920_ or perhaps in 1880, but he doesn’t say so.  Nate’s company manners have always seemed to be about 30 years older than Nate himself, and Brad is not sure if that’s due to money, family, or simply the fact of being British.  Anyway, Brad’s clearly jumped several social ranks in Mrs. Murphy’s estimation since the card arrived yesterday afternoon.  He considers sending a visiting card to Mrs. McEwall’s gas meter, giving his regrets and citing a previous engagement.  But Mrs. Murphys is practically _stroking_ Nate’s card and Brad decides the joke might be lost on an earlier generation.

“He didn’t include his rank,” Mrs. Murphy scrutinizes the card.  Her tone is accusing, as though Brad’s slap-dash American ways have eroded Nate’s courtly etiquette.  And, of course, she _would_ assume that any young man of breeding must naturally be officer-class.

“No.”  Brad tucks the card into the pocket of his uniform shirt. Nate’s rank—all of Nate’s military service—had been a secret during the war, and then an open secret in the months after Germany surrendered.  Brad doesn’t know what the situation report is now. “He didn’t.”

“You served together?” Mrs. Murphy asks, and again, that’s a perfectly reasonable assumption.  And completely untrue: Brad had never met Nate in a military capacity.  They hadn’t served in the same country, or branch of the armed forces.  They were barely in the same theater of war.   In fact, they’d rarely even talked about it.  War had been all around them, an obvious fact: might as well discuss the sky.

“Yes,”   Brad says, and it doesn’t feel like a lie.  “We served together.”

++++

The club looks like someone called up central casting and requested the set-dressing for “English gentleman’s club”: marble fireplaces, stuffy leather chairs, old maps on the walls and thick newspapers on the tables.  It is exactly the sort of place that grants club privileges, _as a courtesy_ , via engraved cards. The only unexpected detail is the location; the place occupies an impeccable Georgian townhouse deep in the City, too close to the Inns of Court to ever be a social gathering place. Even Brad, who knows almost nothing about London, recognizes it’s not a refuge for people who want a popular London address, or a pied-a-terre for men who can’t bring their mistresses home.  It honestly is a place for men whose interests (politics, Brad supposes, or maybe venerable family investments) keep them away from their well-appointed country houses.  
  
An almost painfully correct employee informs Brad that his host has been ‘unaccountably delayed,’ ushers him to a tiny table in what he calls the long bar, and provides him with a glass of scotch that was already aged when Hitler marched into Paris.  
  
Brad is engaged in a staring contest with one of the portraits on the wall when—  
  
“Fancy meeting you here,” Nate says, appearing suddenly behind Brad’s chair with his own glass.  He is wearing one of his beautiful pre-war suits, though he hasn’t replaced the old-fashioned steel spectacles issued by the Soviet hospital in Berlin.  He wears his hair a little longer in the front, now that he’s released from the grooming standard.  The fringe serves to conceal the small scar from the building collapse that had put him in the hospital in the first place.  Brad finds that little bit of vanity curiously endearing.  
  
“So,” Nate sits down opposite, favoring Brad with a cheeky grin, like he didn’t just disappear for nearly four months, “d’you come here often?”  
  
Brad raises one eyebrow.  He lets his gaze drift among the oil-painted worthies on the walls.  _He_ is American and Jewish and possessed of little more than a high school education and a military paycheck.  _They_ must be spinning in their graves.  He doesn’t have to say a word; Nate can read his expression.  
  
 “It was my father’s club,” Nate sounds almost apologetic.  “I’ve sort of inherited it.  Or perhaps it inherited me.” He fidgets with his glass, turning the heavy crystal.  “Really, I mean—well, Father’s family was Catholic going back farther than anyone can tell and Bravo took him anyway, so… That is, it’s really rather liberal.  Modern.  As these things go.”  
  
 “ _As these things go_ ,” Brad repeats, his tone dry enough to evaporate the really good scotch. But he’s spent most of his free time watching plaster dry, like he had when he was nine, so he understands something about the debt sons owe to their fathers.  He changes the subject.  “You left a card.”  
  
Nate shrugs.  “I’m on the dinner lists of all Aunt Agatha’s friends, whenever they need an extra man to make up numbers…the protocol for the informal versus the formal invitation is second nature.”  He doesn’t explain how he learned Brad’s address, or why he didn’t just phone, and Brad doesn’t ask.  
  
“So, where have you been since August?”  And then, to lighten the question, “Good thing you showed up when you did—I was considering seducing a war widow.”  
  
Brad says it as a joke, but Nate’s gaze is serious and his voice is wicked.  “Oh, I couldn’t permit _that._ ”  
  
Brad opens his mouth to say something, but there’s no decent way to respond to that appraising look.  He is still trying to formulate words when the obsequious servant from the front hall reappears.  
  
“Keys for your guest,” he says to Nate and lays down a little saucer with an honest-to-god doily and a single room key on a leather fob.  
  
Brad looks pointedly at the display—all that pomp and circumstance for a key, a _key_!—and then back at Nate.  _Really rather modern?_  
  
“The club keeps guest rooms, for friends of members,” explains Nate, ignoring Brad’s cynical smirk.  
  
“I’d hate for them to have to fumigate once I leave,” Brad retorts. “Working class germs are _so_ damn hard to get out of the good linen.” He knows he sounds like a brat, but he has his pride, he doesn’t make a habit of accepting charity, and—okay, so it stings to think he’s just a _guest_.  
  
Suddenly, under the discreet tablecloth, Nate sets his two feet outside of Brad’s and forces them together.  Brad’s knees are pinned between Nate’s, his legs immobilized to the ankle.  Brad’s mouth instantly goes dry enough to catch on his breath.  He is not sure he can extricate himself with dignity—not sure he wants to:  under his beautiful suit, Nate has really strong thighs.  
  
Nate’s smile manages to be both sweet and sharkish.  “Don’t be silly, you won’t actually be _sleeping_ in that room.”  Then, he releases Brad, stands up, and drops the key in his pocket: “Besides, Britain has manufactured more tanks than taxis the past few years.  You’ll never get a cab this late.”

+++

Nate leaves the bar without looking to see if Brad is following.  Brad hesitates for approximately eight seconds, just to emphasize the point that he won’t simply take orders from just anyone.  He doesn’t wait too long, though.  Far away, people with medals may have signed treaties, but Brad is still mentally on what the Marine Corps calls _war_ _footing_ and in wartime, if you miss your opportunity, it will not come again.  
  
“So…”  Brad catches up with Nate on the wide staircase leading up to the second floor. As they turn down a lushly carpeted hallway, he asks, “Where _have_ you been for the last few months?”  
  
“Spain,” Nate says, shortly.  He doesn’t look at Brad, but he walks close enough that his knuckles brush Brad’s thigh with every other step.  
  
Well.  Brad hadn’t actually expected to get an answer.  Certainly not that one. Spain? Spain had been officially neutral during the war.  Admittedly, that was “neutral” on the side of the Axis, in the way the US had been neutral on the side of the Allies even before Pearl Harbor.  However, Spain had never recovered from its own brutal civil war, so it was hardly a threat to anyone.   Nate had spent his war training partisans, working for a top-secret British military division that sent refugees from Nazi-occupied countries back behind enemy lines to raise resistance against Hitler.  There would be no reason for him to spend weeks anywhere on the Iberian Peninsula.  
  
 “ _Spain?_ ”  
  
“Yes. Up north.  Beautiful beaches, I took some photographs.  They’re in my room if you’d like to see them.”  Nate’s so equable that Brad doesn’t realize he’s received an invitation until Nate opens one of the doors lining the hallway.  
  
“Do you even _speak_ Spanish?”  Brad follows him in but deliberately keeps his eyes away from the massive bed in the shadows.  He has a reputation for iron self-control that he’d like to protect.  Anyway, it’s a serious question: with Nate—student of Greek, reader of Latin, possessor of schoolboy French and rather more German than can easily be explained—you never can tell.  
  
Nate pauses for a moment.  Then he takes a step closer to Brad, and leans in to give him a chaste kiss just at the corner of his mouth.  “Don’t be ridiculous.”  He breaks the kiss before Brad has had nearly enough, crosses the room to crouch down by the fireplace.  He touches his cigarette lighter to a paper spill and, in a moment, the kindling is flickering.  “I didn’t go there to talk.”  
  
He stands and gives Brad that appraising look again.  “Close the door,” he says, in a way that makes Brad forget he’s done taking orders.  
  
Something flickers in Brad’s mind as he turns to fumble with the lock, but then he hears the muffled thump of Nate’s knees on the carpet behind him, followed by a whisper of fabric.  He lets the tension out of his neck, allowing his forehead drop against the heavy wooden door for a moment while he pictures Nate, flushed and glassy-eyed, biting his lip.  There is something hanging on the back of the door—Nate’s uniform, freshly unpacked by one of the club’s innumerable silent servants—and Brad can smell him in the fabric.   He imagines Nate’s tie pulled loose, collar askew, clumsy with eagerness for what Brad is going to give him.  Brad takes a deep breath and turns to face the room.  Damn.  Sweet goddamn.  Prettier than Brad’s mental picture. It may be true, what Ray says about Brad being a self-satisfied, overconfident motherfucker—but _Christ_ , he loves it when he’s right.

++++

The mental flicker returns a few hours later when Nate finally slips out of bed to search out those pictures.  His movements are gracefully loose-jointed, muscles relaxed in his skin…even when that skin bears a new bruise and several lovebites.  That confidence, Brad decides, is his favorite thing about sleeping with Nate.  If Nate has ever felt a moment of guilt or shame, well, he’d overcome it long before he took up with Brad. Nate saunters over to retrieve a Kodak envelope off the mantelpiece, pausing to watch the dying fire and stretch his arms out languorously.  There had been a point, before they’d even made it to bed, when Brad had slung an arm around Nate’s waist and hauled his hips off the floor, trying to get deeper, _closer_.  Probably did a number on Nate’s shoulder, Brad thinks, watching him from the confusion of blankets and expensive sheets.  (Brad had been _so_ good, so careful and slow, spit and Vaseline and the condom Nate had fished out of his suit pocket.  He’d been rewarded when, on his third slow, full stroke, Nate had made a choking noise, arching to catch his breath, and then gasping, _oh, oh shhhiiit._ He hadn’t come—at least, not then—but Brad’s almost never heard him curse, so he counts it a win. Maybe the sounds Nate makes are his favorite part.)  Nate feels him watching and smiles: clearly he thinks any lingering ache was worth in.  
  
When they’d first started, Nate had been almost shy, dropping his eyes as Brad had approached after locking the door.  Brad had to tip his chin up and then he couldn’t resist running his fingers across the faint, threadlike scar hidden under Nate’s hair.  That seemed to turn some sort of key deep inside.  Nate’s eyes had fluttered closed and he’d turned his head into Brad’s hand, mouth open and seeking, closing around Brad’s thumb, running his tongue along the pad of that finger.  (Nate’s _mouth_ —maybe _that_ is Brad’s favorite part of sleeping with Nate). Nate had reached up to undo Brad’s belt and his long, lovely fingers were not at all like Ruth Gordon’s. When he finally got Brad in hand, Nate had made the sweetest noise—a pleased little “ah!” like someone unwrapping a present to find the perfect gift.  
  
Brad is replaying that sound in his head when Nate returns to bed.  It’s a novelty, bed, especially a big, solid four-poster like this one.  There had been Brad’s guest bed at Tangmere, once, but after that they’d had to make do with what they could find in Berlin.  (Nate had been in hospital, Brad had a rack in the serviceman’s hostel.  There had been a few parks, a derelict bandstand, one abandoned train yard.)  Brad had been so grateful to find Nate alive that he couldn’t complain…and Nate had certain ways of encouraging him over any lingering resentment at their situation.  They made do, and by the time he shipped out of Berlin, Brad could categorize the effect of his fingers and/or his tongue on every one of Nate’s erogenous zones, starting from lip-bitten whimpers and progressing through moans all the way up to the stunned, glassy-eyed silence that signals Nate’s impending collapse. He was pretty sure Nate had all the goods on him, too.  
  
Nate tosses the packet of photos on the bed and then actually tries to straighten the sheets and pillows around Brad (who is definitely _not_ moving, possibly ever) before settling himself in the crook of Brad’s sprawled arm like he’s meant to be there.  Brad relents on the never-moving thing long enough to run his fingertips down Nate’s side, just to watch him shiver and twist, still so intensely responsive to Brad’s touch.  He slips one hand around the cut of Nate’s hip to cup his soft cock.  
  
Nate gasps, still sensitive, “Br-aad…”  His hand closes reflexively, crumpling the envelope.  
  
“Shhh,” soothes Brad.  “Don’t have to do anything.  Just holding you.” He pulls Nate’s back against his own chest with his free hand, then pries the photo envelope out of Nate’s fingers.  “Now that we’re sitting comfortably, let’s look at these vacation snaps of yours.”  
  
Silently, they pass the photographs back and forth.  They are the small, square black-and-whites with deckled edges, from an old Brownie.  Brad sees pictures of sheep; several small, tumble-down stone buildings; a church that’s built like a fort: squat and solid with tiny windows, recognizable only by the metal cross on the roof.  After a few minutes, Nate starts to provide explanations. There are beaches and several squares of shifting grey tones, which Nate says are the Cantabrian Sea.  Two posed portraits of farmers, looking pretty much like farmers everywhere.  Scrawny children, scrawny chickens.  Nate is a mediocre photographer and a few of the oddly-cropped exposures are blurred.  He’s not mechanically minded, Brad diagnoses: he hadn’t accounted for the minute delay of the advancing film. It’s heartening to find an arena where Nate’s skills are merely average.  
  
There’s only one picture of Nate himself.  He’s standing at a doorway, turning toward the camera, as though whoever took the picture has just called his name.  
  
“Kids got your camera?”  Brad asks, thinking of the half-dozen grinning, dark-eyed farm children clowning in an earlier photo.  This picture was taken from a low angle.  Either a child, or a seated adult.  Or—Brad imagines someone in Nate’s bed, in the derelict shepherd’s shack that had appeared in another picture.  The mysterious lover reaches for the box camera on the floor, calling out, catching Nate just as he is about to duck outside.  
  
Nate studies the picture.  “Probably.  They were wild about that camera.  Of course, it _was_ the most advanced piece of technology for seventy miles.  Amazing, in this day and age…”  
  
Brad’s right hand has slipped from Nate’s cock, moving lower to knead his balls, his knuckles up against the skin behind them. Nate’s dick had begun to thicken while they discussed pictures of sheep and other people’s kids and how behind the times things are in rural Spain.  The fact that Nate’s body responds to Brad even when his mind is on other things…maybe that is Brad’s favorite part.  
  
Of course, Brad’s spirit may be willing, but his flesh has already been pushed to the limit twice (three times?  Brad tries to estimate based on the pleasant, used feeling in his hips and low back). Fortunately, Brad had discovered in Berlin that he could usually push Nate just a little farther than Nate himself thought.  And when he does so, exploiting Nate’s natural sensitivity, they reach a place where Nate’s innate chivalry burns away. Nate is charmingly considerate in bed (or in a wrecked coal cellar, sprawled on an army-issue greatcoat in an overgrown park, pressed up against an ancient boxcar…with a war on, they’d had to make do). _Good?_ Nate would ask occasionally, between kisses, or _Like this—better now?;_ once he’d actually said _Oh, you’ll like this_ , _can I try…_ like Brad was an experiment.  Then he’d done something with his fingers that, to be fair, Brad _had_ liked, very much.  Brad should be more shocked by this whole thing, by the way they’ve fallen together, but that’s hard to maintain when Nate is behaving like any well-brought-up host: light-hearted, self-effacing, inventive in thinking up new entertainments.  Just wants everyone to have a good time. But it’s exciting to be the one who entices Nate from sweet eagerness to a more selfish kind of need. Makes Nate noisy and greedy. Once, their second-to-last-time in Berlin, in a gazebo behind an abandoned house, Brad had made Nate sob out loud, thinking of no one’s pleasure but his own.  
  
Now, Nate protests a little, halfheartedly amused: “Christ, Brad, a-again?  You’re—mmm, _there_ —insatiable, do you know that?”—but he lets Brad manhandle his arms over his head, leaving himself open.  Vulnerable, trusting.  Once Brad’s kisses move south, Nate’s legs come up instinctively, wrapping themselves around Brad’s waist…as though Brad might leave before the job is done.  Not fucking likely.  Nate’s nipples always require some experimentation; they seem to be connected to his dick, so every lick or pinch causes him to automatically roll his hips or jerk up against Brad.  (Alone in his room at Mrs. Murphy’s, Brad had run his hands across his own chest.  Hadn’t really felt much beyond a residual excitement from thinking about Nate, but it was worth a try.  Nate made Brad want to try all kinds of new things).  
By the time Brad has completed his reconnaissance, Nate’s nipples are tight, his skin is flushed, and his cock is mostly hard.  A muscle in his abdomen jumps, so Brad traces with his tongue until he can nuzzle Nate’s balls.  Nate is quiet in bed, at least compared to Brad, so when Brad swallows him down, he lays one had on Nate’s stomach.  The flex and clench of muscles there relay the sitrep as Nate fights for control and finally gives in, as he must.  Brad hums around the head of Nate’s cock, pleased, when Nate’s hips finally snap up.  He’s not as good at this as Nate is, which offends his competitive nature, but he does win a few muffled moans.  
  
Nate shudders when Brad slips a Vaseline-coated finger into his body—he’s tender and a little tight despite their earlier activities; maybe there really wasn’t anyone in Spain.  
  
“Too much?”  
  
“Nnnn…good—perf…It’s…”  Brad curves his fingers slightly and Nate seems to lose the thread of what he’s going to say. His head lolls back on the pillow, his arms braced against the headboard so he’s stretched out, completely at Brad’s mercy.  
  
“Yeah, let me in,” croons Brad, easing in a second finger, wrapping his free hand around Nate’s spit-slick cock, working it in time with Nate’s undulating hips.  He doesn’t give a damn about Spain.  Nate is his now, eyes glazed, thighs flexing.  His breath is starting to hitch into needy little grunts, loud for Nate-- _uh, uh, uh_ \--rough because he’s so aroused he can’t even get a full breath.   “C’mon, sweetheart.”  
  
This was the great discovery of Brad’s time in Berlin: if pushed far enough, Nate seizes and spasms and then goes all boneless and incoherent. He crumples against Brad, breathing like he’s been shot—heavy, liquid gasps—and within ten minutes, he falls deeply and instantly asleep. Brad spent a fair amount of time watching Nate sleep when he was hospitalized in Berlin, but there sleep was shallow, twitchy and easily broken.  Now, Nate is so completely undone that Brad can physically move him to untangle the sheets, flip the pillow under his head to the cool side without getting more than a faint mumble.  At last, Brad turns off the lamp and settles in to watch Nate’s sleeping face in the light of the dying fire.  This, _this_ is definitely Brad’s favorite part.  
  
He brushes back Nate’s bangs, traces the scar beneath more gently than he needs to—Nate is down for the count. Brad remembers the hospital in Berlin where they had bandaged this scar and others.  He thinks about how Nate had hidden himself away in the Spanish countryside. Alone. For a month.  Spain, which was war-torn, yes, but not by _Nate’s_ war.  “I didn’t go there to talk,” Nate had said: he had gone there to be silent, among strangers who didn’t know his history.  
Along with the other injuries after the building collapse in Germany, Brad recalled one that couldn’t be treated with stitches and bandages: the visiting nurse had diagnosed compounded nervous exhaustion.  Combat fatigue.  Shell-shock, they’d called it in the last war; once or twice, in his more rural CCC postings, Brad had heard it referred to simply as _soldier’s heart_.  
  
Nate sleeps with his mouth open slightly, one arm flung over his head, the hand curled on nothing, his feet tangled with Brad’s under the blankets.  Asleep, he looks so untroubled that Brad can barely reconcile himself to the obvious truth: Nate—stiff upper-lip, grace under pressure, calm in any crisis Nate—had a bit of a crack-up.

++++

When Brad wakes up the next morning, Nate is sitting on the edge of the bed, watching him.  He’s changed into the dress uniform that was hanging on the back of the door, and if he’d spent roughly six of the last ten hours being thoroughly debauched, you wouldn’t know it to look at him.  If he’s on the recovery side of a pesky little mental breakdown, you wouldn’t know that, either.  
  
Nate leans forward to smooth out Brad’s hair…just to touch, really, since Brad’s hair is short and hopeless at the best of times.  “I turned back the bedding in your room, so it looks slept in,” he says. “If you leave the keys with the porter, no one will be the wiser.”  
  
Still half-asleep, Brad glances around the room they’re in.  Nate has banked the cold fire and collected the clothing that must have been strewn around the room.  Brad recognizes his own clothes folded in a wing chair. “Think of everything.  Time’s it?” he mutters and then and his brain clears, “How long have you been up?”  
  
“There’s hot water for shaving and they serve breakfast in the dining room.”  Nate pulls aside one of the heavy drapes at the window, letting in the weak grey light of a November morning in London.  
  
Brad scrubs his hands over his face.  “Great.  Okay.  Give me, er, ten minutes and we can go down.  Or should we go separately and meet up?”  He kind of hopes Nate opts for the latter; he could probably use a bath after last night’s adventures.  
  
“Oh, I can’t stay,” Nate says.  “I have to go work.”  
  
Brad’s not awake enough to conceal his dumb-founded expression.  
  
“I have to be at, uh, one of the ministries. We’re transitioning, and I’m a…a liason,” says Nate, a little defensively, clearly editing as he talks.  Brad is suddenly keenly aware that he doesn’t have the right nationality or security clearance to know anything more.  
  
“Now? It’s Saturday morning!”  
  
“All hands to the plow, I’m afraid.”  
  
“What the fuck do you know about plows?!”  Brad growls, because the war is _over_.  Because he’s waited, very patiently, _so_ patiently for _months_.  Because he came when called—or rather, when summoned by a goddamn card—and he hadn’t asked any awkward questions about Spain, and, and now Nate is leaving him.  Again.  Brad almost asks if he can expect to find money on the bedside table, but Nate is standing there looking prim enough that he probably wouldn’t get the reference.  
  
“I really…”  begins Nate, and then changes tack, “It’s just a busy time, but I didn’t want to be in London and not see you, so—”  
  
“You’re going to be late for work,” Brad interrupts sharply, and then rolls onto his side, pulls the blankets up, and closes his eyes. He and Nate had done a hell of a lot more than _see_ each other, but if Nate prefers not to acknowledge that…well, fine.  
  
He can _hear_ Nate hesitating, actually moving a few steps toward the bed.  
  
“Brad,” he begins, but Brad is going to fake sleep until he gets a truly amazing apology and possibly a blow job, fuck whatever ministry Nate is working for and…was that the hall door?  
  
Brad opens his eyes.  He waits a minute, unmoving, for Nate to return, and sits up in a panic when he realizes that he _isn’t coming back_.  He throws back the blankets and grabs the essential bits of his uniform from the chair where Nate has folded them.   Dashes for the door, decides he won’t be able to catch up with Nate, reverses and heads for the window. He shoves aside the drapery and muscles open the frame.  The street is grey and damp from last night’s rain and there are already clusters of men walking to work in the nearby government buildings.  
  
Brad had never really thought about it before, but somewhere along the way he’d memorized the way Nate walked.  Now he can pick the man out of the morning crowd simply by his gait.  He watches Nate move crisply along the sidewalk and around the corner.  And then he’s gone.  
  
So, although Brad does see Nate again, briefly, he does not return to Mathilda in the winter, either.

++++

Three weeks later, Brad goes to deliver a supply manifest to a detachment of Royal Marines.  There are runners for this sort of thing, but not enough to go around, and he’s perfectly happy to get out into the winter afternoon for awhile.  Brad’s never been much for office work. (“ _Someone has invented little gadgets for pulling staples out of paper_ ,” he had written to Ray, “ _the very existence of which is an affront to my warrior spirit._ ”  For once, Ray hadn’t written back anything mocking).   He’s got about seven more weeks on this six-month hitch, and after that, who knows?  Go back to California? Or maybe Ray can put in a word, get him flying bombers out in the desert or something.  Brad is beginning to miss the ocean, but he misses flying more.  And after all, why would he stay in England?  
  
The Marines are based in what used to be HQ for one of the smaller government agencies.  The paper-pushers had been evicted for the duration with half the property used for a barracks while the other half had been enlisted as a civilian hospital during the Blitz. Now everything is going to be returning to normal—Brad has a sheaf of supply manifests to prove it.  
  
He gets the papers to the right person and then agrees to a cup of stewed tea in the mess. He leaves his coat on so none of the squaddies can see his rank and just sits into the warmth of the far back corner, listening to guys bitch and moan.  For a little while, it’s like there’s still a war on.  
  
He’s on his way back to the office (still a phrase that makes him want to slit his wrists) when he sees Nate’s walk.  Nate’s walk, but not Nate, in a cluster of nurses crossing what used to be the forecourt of whatever ministry building this is.  He stops mid-stride and actually peers through the bars of the wrought-iron fence to get a closer look.  He’s staring so hard that she must intuit that she’s being watched, because she turns and scans the fenceline. They recognize each other at exactly the same moment, and Nate’s sister Em still has all the family charisma in her smile.

++++

They talk for five minutes through the wrought-irons scrollwork before Brad shakes himself, remembers his manners, and invites her to the nearest pub.  They don’t need to do all their catching up in the street.  She turns him down—still nominally on duty until they finish packing up the hospital—and issues her own invitation: to her wedding at Mathilda in the spring, when her fiancée is demobbed.  
  
As soon as she mentions it, Brad remembers Nate mentioning her engagement, back when they’d met in Weisbaden, when he’d first learned what Nate had done in the war.  Brad offers his congratulations and is working up to a really good excuse, when she interrupts.  
  
“Please come,” and then, a little sadly, “It will be a very small ceremony.”  Brad is confused for a moment:  he hadn’t even made it through his _own_ wedding—she should hardly be apologizing to him for the size of her own.  And then he realizes, of course, _why_ it will be so small.   Cousins, neighbors, school friends…this war hasn’t hit the upper classes quite as hard as the last one, but there will be a lot of empty pews, nevertheless.  
  
“Of course,” Brad relents.  “Wouldn’t miss it.”  He almost adds, _ask your brother for my address_ …but that’s not fair.  Em Fick is not her brother’s keeper.  She grins and, after quickly surveying the area for observers, stands on her tiptoes to peck his cheek through the fence.  He jots down Mrs. Murphy’s address on a strip torn from the bottom of an old service form.  In mid-February, he gets a handwritten letter setting a date in late March.  _Do let us know your travel arrangements.  Can you stay at least the weekend?,_ Em writes, _Nate and Lou will be so pleased to see you_.   Brad figures at least half of that statement is true.

++++

As Nate had said, metal and manufacturing had been devoted to building tanks and battleships for the last decade, so even with the war over, there are still not enough trains.  Brad is lucky to get one out of London, even if it means standing in the corridor for the last four station stops.  When he emerges onto the Chichester platform tired and sour, he misses Louisa entirely at first.  Nate’s baby sister has grown tall enough to wear one of Em’s cut-down nursing capes, so at first the uniform blue blends in with the rest of the military crowd bound for Tangmere.  But she is, true to form, toting a section of her knitting.  When she waves to get his attention, the draft of the train nearly tugs it out of her hand, unfurling it like a flag of surrender: it’s the flash of white that finally catches Brad’s eye.  
  
Even as he crosses the platform, closing in, Brad has to search her face for familiar features.  Her hair?  Her hair is different, but there’s something else, indefinable. She’s a young lady now, though she was—what, ten? twelve? when he saw her last.  Now that little girl is gone.  
  
Christ, it had been such a _long_ war.

Lou starts talking as soon as she sees him, and at least some things never change.  “You’re still so tall,” she marvels, before slipping her arm through his and guiding him down the platform.  She had wanted to pick him up in the car—“Em’s Davy has one, or his father does, and I know how to drive.  Caroline, she goes to school with me, her brother taught us when he was home on leave.  Nate was _furious_ when he found out, he said he didn’t send me to that school to break my neck, but if the war had lasted, I would have been able to drive an ambulance and…”—but they go out past Tangmere on the bus and then walk the last two miles.   It is late March and things are just starting to bloom, but the sun still sets early.  It is sinking into an unseasonably warm evening as they finally reach the dooryard where Brad had arrived for Christmas years ago, during the war.  And that is how Brad, finally, returns to Mathilda.

++++

Brad stays the weekend.  He attends the quiet ceremony in the local church.  In fact, he is seated right up front, with the bride’s family.  “You don’t mind, do you?”  Em asks the night before.  “It’s just, otherwise there’s only Nate and Aunt A and my cousin Beth.  Davy’s coming with half a Welsh village.  It will look dreadfully unbalanced.” She’s so earnest, concerned that Brad might object to being seen as part of her family, that Brad wouldn’t disappoint her, even if he did object.  In fact, it’s the nicest compliment he’s received.  
  
“I’ll sit wherever you put me, just get Lou to kick me if I’m supposed to stand or kneel or something.”  
  
“Oh, it’s Church of England, and low church, so there’s less kneeling than you’d think,” Em smiles.  
  
Brad has always been a little sketchy on the differences between the Christian denominations in England, but he gathers it’s sort of a big deal for Em not to be married in a Catholic church.  He’s not sure, though, so all he says is, “oh.”  
  
Em gives him a sideways look that must be familial, because it’s _just like_ Nate’s.  Mind-reading must also be genetic because she explains, “We compromised: married in Davy’s religion, my home.  He cared a great deal and I…didn’t,” she finishes with a shrug. Brad thinks about all of the carnage she must have seen as a nurse and wonders if the war changed her views on religion.  
  
“And Lou is maid of honor, so she’ll be up at the altar.  But I’ll get Nate to kick you.”  
  
Nate doesn’t kick him.  But when he comes back to the pew after walking Em down the aisle, after _giving away_ a little piece of his already small family, Brad inches his hand along the pew to Nate’s.  They both keep their eyes on the altar, where the minister is reminding the congregation matrimony is an honorable estate…  At the touch of Brad's fingers, Nate’s hand jumps and then settles next to Brad’s, just for a moment, until he has to stand and answer the minister’s question about who giveth this woman to be married.

++++

Although Nate and his siblings still technically own Mathilda Farm, the Ministry of Agriculture  runs the farm, and will do so for the foreseeable future.  As Nate explains it, Britain had imported more than half of its food from the Continent before the war and...  Brad nods.  He doesn’t need details: the world has just spent at least half a decade conscripting farmers, abandoning livestock, and bombing arable land.  It’ll be _years_ before Europe can feed itself, much less export to Britain.  “Hitler might as well have salted the fields,” Nate concludes grimly.  
  
One advantage of peacetime, however, is that demob has opened up housing in Tangmere village for the Ministry farmworkers. Nate and Brad have the house to themselves.  They don’t really _need_ a music room or a day nursery or any of the half-dozen rooms that Nate had closed up to save on heating fuel at the beginning of the war.  But that doesn’t mean they can’t find a use for them, especially in summer.  Brad has a bruise on his hip for a week from fucking Nate over the piano bench in that music room, and the sight of Nate, debauched and drowsy in one of the narrow single beds in the old servants’ quarters, will be with him forever.  
  
The eccentric old house also provides Brad with plenty to keep him busy.  He learns its history piecemeal, from Nate's stories and references Lou makes when she visits for weekends from boarding school, from books in the library and old pictures on the walls.  It was Nate's mother's family estate, which fell to her when two male cousins and a brother were killed in the Great War. For years,the lands were rented and the house closed up while Nate’s parents were in Rhodesia. After their deaths, it was occupied sporadically until Nate reached his majority and could re-establish it as _home_ for his siblings.  During the war, it was crammed full of rotating Agriculture Ministry staff with neither the time nor the resources to keep up with repairs.  The house at Mathilda Farm is overdue for some love.  
  
Brad replaces the rain-swollen windows on the south side and shores up the rotten screens in the summer house.  He patches the chimney flashing.  He prunes the lavender walk, now mostly overgrown with mint, and keeps an eye on Lou’s old Victory Garden when she returns to school. After he finds himself whistling sometimes, just to fill the quiet—half-remembered music from servicemen’s dances, CCC barracks, even California:  _We’ll Meet Again, Ay Carmela, Let Me Call You Sweetheart_ \--he spends a week of quiet evenings in the library, mending the wireless while Nate reads in a circle of lamplight.  He wonders if Nate knows how to dance.  
  
He buys a motorbike, an old Triumph whose gears will need to be completely rebuilt.  Ray fusses, by airmail:  “Brad, you may have married money, but in the opinion of this soldier, it would have been more financially effective to wait six months before blowing your wad.  Trust your old pal Ray-Ray: all the Allies are going to be selling off their military transport for cheap. Jeeps and bikes will be more common than hooker pussy at a USO concert.” But Brad doesn’t want a military cast-off (although he’d be willing to consider it for the right kind of hardware—if he could buy, say, a tank).  His new bike is “pre-war”, to use a word just coming into fashion. It spent most of the hostilities tucked safely away in a barn, stalled by the petrol rationing.  The farmer who sells it to him remarks that they don’t make ‘em like this anymore and Brad agrees.  He assumes it’s just a turn of phrase until Nate explains that the statement is literally true: the Triumph manufacturing works in Coventry were bombed flat during Luftwaffe raids in 1940.  
  
Occasionally, Nate’s former colleagues will stop in for lunch.  Nate is always careful to brief Brad on their cover stories: “As far as Bill is concerned, Jean worked general clerical for the war: typing, dictation, filing, that sort of thing.”  
  
Brad rolls his eyes.  Nate was practically a fucking _spymaster_ during the war; he’d bet his pension that there wasn’t much filing going on. “Which means, what?  She really cracked Uboat codes from Berlin to ensure the safety of Allied shipping?”  
Nate does not correct him.   Just raises one eloquent eyebrow.  
  
“Shit, Nate—seriously?”  
  
“Nazi Naval general staff was mostly at Kiel, not Berlin,” Nate replies.  
  
Brad opens his mouth--like _geography_ was the weak point in that statement?!--And then… “but they’ve been married for, what, two years?  Her husband has to know…”  
  
“He doesn’t, and he won’t.  I am assured of this. _Filing_ ,”  Nate says repressively.  “Dictation.”  
  
“Okay, okay.  He won’t hear it from me.  So, what’s my story?  Who am I?”  
  
Nate smiles. “You’re the houseguest.”  
  
The couple comes; they are perfectly charming.  Nate gives them lunch.  Nothing untoward happens, unless you count the fact that half of the married couple has deceived the other completely

++++

Brad leaves the war with a duffle the size of his torso and an Army Air Corps footlocker.  Not long after the wedding, he has it all shipped to Mathilda.  It’s mostly clothing and gear, broken equipment and a few books: he carries no souvenirs of the war because he’s a goddamn professional.  Unless you want to count a partially-crushed packet of Charms from a C-ration he’d eaten on the transport across the Channel.  And that’s not really a memento…just, well, Brad doesn’t like to throw away food, but Lou has gone back to school and he sure as hell isn’t going to eat _Charms_ himself.  
  
Nate doesn’t even have a footlocker.  He comes home from war with a single small suitcase, like a traveling salesman, like a civilian.  Which is, Brad supposes, probably better for his cover anyway.  
  
Five times over the next year, Nate packs the suitcase again and disappears for four or seven or ten days.  Once, he is gone for two weeks.  “Government communications?” Brad asks, knowing that was Nate’s cover during the war.  Verbally, Nate neither confirms or denies, but his tired smile says it all.  The first time, Brad tells Mrs. Campbell, who comes three times a week to cook and clean, that Nate has gone to visit Lou at school.  Mrs. C. beams approvingly, “He’s such a good brother to those girls.  There’s not many men so close to their sisters.”  Brad wishes he’d come up with a better story when Nate returns, looking wrung out and exhausted, not at all like he’d had a pleasant Speech Day weekend with Louisa.  
  
Brad happens to be in Mathilda’s entrance hall when Nate returns that first time.  He’s chipping the last of the blackout paint off the northwest window at the corner of the minstrel’s gallery when he sees Nate walk up the front drive, carrying his little suitcase.  He drops the suitcase at the door and continues across the entrance hall, trips up the stairs to the half-landing.  
He puts his hat on the spindly little table right where the staircases split to the gallery and pushes his glasses on top of his head.  He presses the heels of his palms against his eyes.  It’s a gesture so familiar that Brad recognizes it just from the set of Nate’s shoulders; he’s seen in a dozen times, usually when Nate reads too late into the night and strains the eye originally injured in Germany. But this time, Nate takes off the glasses completely, drops them carelessly near the hat.  A metallic _clunk_ —his watch—follows, tumbling off the table as Nate continues up the stairs.  The overcoat is next, and then Nate strips off his uniform jacket.  His tie slips from his hand, slithering over the railing, but Nate doesn’t even turn to see where it falls.  He goes straight to bed.  
  
Maybe it’s habit, but he continues right past the large suite where he sleeps with Brad and continues to the end of the hallway, to the sparsely furnished room he shared with his brother when they were children.  Brad is still as a statue for a solid minute after he hears the door close, unsure of what he’s just witnessed.  Then he puts down the razor blade he was using to chip blackout paint.  Piece by piece, he retrieves Nate’s things: the small suitcase abandoned by the door, the glasses, the tie.  
  
When he enters the bedroom, Nate is already asleep, sprawled across the nearest bed.  He’s kicked his shoes into a corner and his uniform blouse is partially undone, like he dropped off in the middle of unbuttoning.  Brad has a sudden memory of his sister sleepwalking; aged 6 or 7, Ginny would make her way to the coat closet, put on a sweater.  His gran had said you must never wake a sleepwalker: the shock could kill them.  Brad hasn’t thought of that in years.  Shaking his head at the vagaries of memory, he puts Nate’s things on the spare bed (he’d never asked which bed Nate’s brother slept in, before boarding school, before university and the RAF and his death somewhere over the Channel). He briefly considers covering Nate with the overcoat, a big, Soviet thing he was given second-hand in Berlin and which they don’t have enough clothing coupons to replace.  But the room is warm.  It’s nearly May.  Where was Nate that he needed a coat designed for Siberia?  
  
In the end, Brad leaves the overcoat with the other clothing.  It’s too big on Nate, anyway, makes him look like a boy playing soldier.  He does put Nate’s glasses on the floor, right below his outstretched hand, though, so that Nate will be able to see clearly when he wakes.

++++

Nate sleeps for 19 hours, waking early the next afternoon.  He appears, blinking, in the doorway of the library, where Brad is studying the French doors that Patterson, the farm manager, had jerry-rigged together in 1943.  
  
“Hey, you got the blackout off all the windows,”  Nate exclaims, like he has no memory of his arrival the day before.  “It’s practically midsummer out there!”  
  
“Sleeping beauty!  Your spell is broken,”  Brad responds, drily.  If Nate’s not going to offer an explanation, _he_ certainly won’t start the conversation.  
  
Nate looks at his wrist—surprised to find his watch missing—and then peers at the mantle clock.  “Christ, is that really the time?  No wonder I’m starving.  Did Mrs. C. leave anything?”  He wanders over to look at the badly mended lock, then picks up Brad’s wrist to check _his_ watch with the sort of casual possessiveness that still makes Brad’s breath catch. “Still can’t believe that’s the time,” he says to himself.  And then, “Of course, I never could sleep on the boat-train.”   And that’s all he ever says about the first journey.  
  
But one night, after the third trip Nate has made with the suitcase—all ending the same way, with a somnolent scattering of possessions and hours of deep, healing sleep—Brad stops in to check on Nate and his eyes snap open.  It’s past midnight, Brad was on the way to bed himself, and he is careful not to speak: it doesn’t do to wake sleepwalkers.  
  
“Confirmation details,” Nate’s voice is rusty with sleep, but otherwise expressionless.  He blinks up at Brad.  There’s only a little light spilling in from the hall; his pupils look huge and dark.  “For prisoner exchanges.  And to repatriate the bodies.”  
  
“Nate,” Brad says, tired and confused himself, “Nate, you need to go to sleep.” It’s a plea, but Brad tries to infuse it with the strength he used to boss around Ray and other junior servicemen.  Maybe that works, because Nate obediently closes his eyes.  Brad sits down on the spare bed, intending to wait just until Nate’s breathing settles into sleep.  Now it is his turn to stare into the dark.  
  
The peace treaties are holding.  The war is really over.  And so all the agents that Nate had trained, the expatriates he had taught and shepherded and persuaded to return to their Nazi-occupied homelands are coming to light. But the Special Operations agents had been smuggled back to their homelands as Allied double-agents, their true identities buried so deeply that officially they hadn’t existed at all.  Who else but Nate could confirm that these asylum-seekers or those suspected collaborators are really who they to be: heroes of the Allied resistance?  
  
Of course, Brad remembers Nate once telling him that the agents he ran survived for an average of six weeks in Nazi territory.  And that estimate might be generous. After all, they’d been a cadre of hastily trained civilians, dropped behind enemy lines with only the most rudimentary instructions: inspire trouble, make things difficult for the Nazi overlords, do not go gentle.  
  
Brad suspects Nate’s recent trips are not about happy reunions or the thanks of grateful nations.  The Allies are preparing for a massive war crimes tribunal in a little city in southern Germany.  There, they will prosecute a new facet of justice: crimes against humanity.  The authorities will need to know if the corpse in this mass grave could possibly be…, if these marks indicate torture or if they had been present before the subject left England…?  
  
Winston Churchill has just made a speech, in Missouri of all places, speaking about an “iron curtain” descending across Europe.  A lot of information has been lost behind that curtain, and anyone who might have more information is in demand by many governments.  Did anyone hear from these partisans after the raid on the night of….?  Were there any distinguishing features or possessions that could be used to identify the badly decomposed remains left when the Nazis retreated from…?  Can anyone corroborate that people with the following code names had ever existed…? Brad looks at the ceiling and counts Nate’s sleeping breaths, allowing the knowledge to settle.  Nate is driving himself to exhaustion trying to determine the fates of the colleagues he sent to die.

++++

The next morning, Nate wakes up only a little later than his usual time.  He still has shadows under his eyes, nearly dark as bruises. (Brad had never really believed that people got visible shadows under their eyes, probably because there had been months during the war when he hadn’t seen more of his reflection than could fit in his small shaving mirror. He believes it now).  Nate picks at his breakfast, puts aside the _Times_ crossword half-done and folds his glasses next to it.  He massages his temple, rubs his eye—the bad eye, Brad notes.  He doesn’t seem to remember speaking to Brad the night before, but then, he never does.  
  
“Headache?”  Brad asks casually, pressing his palm to the side of Nate’s face.  His hand is warm from holding his coffee. (Brad will drink the fucking _Thames_ before he will drink tea.  He’s a coffee man and his coffee must be scalding).  He can feel Nate turn, unconsciously, into the heat.  
  
“No,” Nate lies.  
  
“So,”  Brad clear his throat. “I think you should write your memoirs,” he says suddenly.  “You know, kind of _What did you Do in the War, Daddy?_ You could call it _The Making of a Spymaster_ ,” he suggests, striving for casual.  
  
Nate opens his eyes and shakes off Brad’s hand.  He looks concerned, worried that Brad has hit his head and suffered amnesia about a vital plot point.  “Brad, I signed the Official Secrets Act. The only people who could read what I wrote have to wear four stars—and maybe not even then.  I signed my name--I _promised_.”  
  
“Not for publication,” Brad clarifies.  Because, really, _he_ should not be the one on the receiving end of concerned looks.  
  
“What, then? For _posterity_?”  And Brad is not sure how someone who puts such value and emphasis on a _promise_ can sound so bitter.  He folds his hands around his coffee, sorry he ever said anything.  His next sip tastes charred, like that crap rationed ersatz stuff.  He goes to pour it down the sink, aware that Nate’s eyes follow him across the kitchen.  He rinses the mug, already regretting his next words. He’s going to sound like a goddamn Viennese witch doctor.  If Ray ever hears it, Brad will deny to the last breath in his body.  But now, he sets the mug precisely on the draining board, takes a breath, and turns to face the _concern._  
  
“I just don’t think it’s good to keep all of it inside, that’s all.  All that… knowledge.  All those people.  It’s not,” Brad means to say _healthy_ , but the word that comes out is—“safe.” Regardless, the confusion on Nate’s face almost makes it worthwhile, having to spout this emotional nonsense. The confusion fades into surprise, and, really, did Nate think Brad wouldn’t notice when Nate’s guilt and anguish was actually physical?  
  
“Anyway,” Brad concludes, “Patterson wants to show me the irrigation drill the Ministry has put in the northeastern field.  I won’t be back for lunch.”

++++

That night, like the universe is punishing him for thinking profanely about the subconscious, Brad dreams about the little German girl.  For the first time, he dreams that she is _here_ , at Mathilda. He hears the front door open and he turns, expecting it to be Nate.  But it isn’t.  He’s never understood why _she_ has stuck in his mind—and his dreams. He only saw her once, in life, but he knows her by the gap between her front teeth, by the shape of her eyes.   He thinks she would have dimples if she weren’t so thin.  In his dream, she does not cross Mathilda’s entrance hall, she just suddenly appears in the gallery opposite.  But instead of scraping the blackout paint off, she is painting it back on.  She has the paintbrush in one hand and the fingers of the other wrapped around the window frame. And she is too close to the edge of the window.  Even as he thinks this, part of Brad’s sleeping mind recognizes the foolishness of her actions, remembers that in the real, solid, waking world, the gallery windows don’t open.  But he still feels panic as she stretches to darken the last clear space in the window.  
  
Brad is going to tell her that she’s too far out—it’s dangerous.  He opens his mouth, but before he can make a sound…or maybe he already has, because she turns, startled, and loses her grip.  The deflating sound she makes as she falls is the same sound Nate’s Soviet overcoat made falling on the stairs: a soft weight, but heavy.  
  
Brad is sitting up before he’s fully awakened, and he nearly shouts when he feels Nate’s hand on his shoulder.  Instead, he makes a weird sort of choking sound: he tongue is glued to the roof of his dry mouth.  Maybe he’d hadn’t said anything after all?  But then why had the girl turned to look at him, to respond, as though she had something to tell him…  
  
“Do you want something?  A glass of water?”  Nate asks quietly.  
  
“You shouldn’t wake sleepwalkers,” replies Brad, his throat dry and scratchy. “They could die.”  Even as he says it, his mind is untangling itself from the dream.  He knows the words don’t make sense.  
  
“You’re not going to die,” Nate soothes, rational and ever-patient in a crisis.  “No one is dying.  You’re going to be fine.”  
  
“No, it’s just—” Brad scrubs his hands over his face, trying to bring himself fully back into the world.  “It’s something my grandmother used to say.  I’ve been thinking about it, lately, for some reason.”  
  
“Mmhmm,”  Nate lays back down, pulling gently at the back of Brad’s shirt until he follows.  Brad is cold now, though it’s summer: he’s sweated through his pajama shirt, but the pillow is dry.  Nate must have flipped it, and…  
  
“What else have you been thinking of, lately?” Nate interrupts gently, setting his chin into the notch of Brad’s shoulder so he can pull the light summer blanket over them both.  
  
_It’s not good to keep all these people inside_ , Brad thinks, and so he begins, “When I was trying to find you in that hospital in Germany, I saw a little girl on a train platform, just for a minute.  And ever since…”  
  
Brad doesn’t remember how much of the story he tells before he finally falls asleep.  Not that it’s really a story.  A story would have a beginning, a middle, an _end_.  The little girl would have a name and a cause for being on the train platform. She and Brad would do more than just glimpse each other.  There would be a purpose to their meeting, a reason why, in a war full of chance encounters and sad situations, _this_ is the one that followed him home.  But war is mostly confusion, meaninglessness, good luck, bad luck—why should this be any different?

++++

Brad wakes up late.  The tinny travel alarm clock he carried all through the war (not that he needed it, with all the drill instructors and bossy brass) sits silently on the bedside table.  It still keeps perfect time, despite everything.  Nate must have turned it off when he got up.  Brad goes to the kitchen--vast, cavernous, meant for a large staff cooking for a big household, not just two refugees from the war.  Nate's morning pot of tea is on the worktop, cold, but Nate himself enters not long after, toting the shopping from Tangmere village. He must've gotten up at the crack of dawn.  
  
Nate unpacks a box of nails for Brad's next project, three children’s copybooks, a new packet of tea.  Brad examines the notebooks as Nate refolds the paper sack and adds it to the pile he keeps in the pantry for the day when they need a dozen paper bags.  They are the small, olive green workbooks sold at the Tangmere Stationer for use in the local grammar school.  
  
Brad doesn't know what to say.  It wasn't that he didn't think Nate would consider his advice...he just thought he'd need to fight a little harder.  He wonders if his nightmare did the arguing for him. _That_ is not a conversation he wants to have before coffee.  
  
“It was your idea,”  Nate remarks when he finds Brad thumbing through the ruled pages.  
  
“Yes, but three?  You’re hardly General Sherman—or General Eisenhower, for that matter,” Brad teases.  And then—“Oh, god, you’re going to write one of those Greek epics, aren’t you?  Kids will have to memorize verses.  Schoolboys will curse my name for generations.”  
  
“Schoolboys will never read it,”  Nate retorts, collecting the books.  “Besides, it was a long war.”  
  
“Well, that’s certainly how I remember it, sir.”  
  
Nate is standing at the old farm sink as they speak. High above him is a window that lets out onto the kitchen garden; Brad can see it, green with nascent summer. It's going to be a beautiful day at Mathilda Farm, as peaceful as though the war had never happened.  But it had.

 

++++

_"Young men make wars, and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men – courage and hope for the future._

_Then old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men – mistrust and caution. It must be so."_

**Author's Note:**

> In this AU, Brad flies planes for the US Army Air Force during WWII. Briefly invalided to an English country hospital, he and his RAF sidekick Ray spend Christmas 1942 at Nate's family farmhouse. Hijinks ensue in "Owed By So Many to So Few": Brad befriends Nate's sisters, Ray falls for Polish-partisan Walt, Brad falls into bed with Nate, everyone wonders why Nate is shirking on the homefront. Things are misinterpreted, feelings get hurt, all is eventually resolved and we learn that Nate has been working for the SOE the whole time. In the second story, "The Shortest Way Home," Brad and Nate reunite in a recently-surrendered Germany after Nate is injured. Then, three-four months later, the events of this story take place.


End file.
